When HEROES don't come HOME

Chapter Twenty-Eight – The Package

The first knock came politely, two neat taps that sounded like someone who had done this a thousand times and never once needed to knock a third. Emily paused with her hands still wet from the sink, the dish towel looped over her shoulder like a white flag. The apartment held its breath with her. Pipes ticked; the fridge hummed. Nothing else moved. A second knock, same rhythm. Not neighborly. Professional. She crossed the room without hurrying, drying her palms as she went. At the door she stood to the side of the frame—old habit—slid the chain across, and brought her eye to the peephole. Courier. Navy windbreaker with a stitched logo, cap brim low enough to throw a shadow over his eyes. The parcel was tucked against his hip the way people who carry too many parcels every day learn to do. He consulted a scanner, glanced once at the hallway camera, then back at the door. The stance said routine; the eyes said he’d like this stop to be over. “Delivery,” he called, just loud enough to be audible through wood and habit. Emily cracked the deadbolt, kept the chain, opened the door a hand’s width. “Yes?” “Signature,” he said, and slid a clipboard into the slot. The paper parcel followed, angled so she could see the label. Brown paper. Clear tape, smooth and bubbleless. A printed sticker in sans serif block: > CONTENTS: COSMETICS Fragile. Keep upright. Her name and address underneath, machine-clean. “I didn’t—” she began, and stopped herself. No sense in handing a stranger information he hadn’t asked for. “It’s prepaid.” He held the pen in two fingers like a neutral pledge. “Right there.” She glanced past him down the hall. The carpet was the color of compromise. The elevator light glowed its patient numbers. No lingering figures, no doors suspiciously ajar. Still, she signed a version of her name that resembled her hand and wouldn’t stand up under a microscope. The courier took the board, steadying the parcel as she accepted it. It weighed less than it looked—light for something labeled fragile, as if whatever was inside wasn’t glass but a single compact weight cushioned in modest theater. She felt no slosh of liquid, no granular shift. Just a presence. “Have a good one,” the courier said, already turning. His footsteps clicked toward the elevator in evenly spaced pairs. She watched him go through the chain until the doors closed and swallowed him whole. The apartment seemed bigger when she shut the door, and emptier. Shadows had edges. She set the parcel on the coffee table and stood over it. The label—COSMETICS—looked like a lie pretending to be a joke. She ran her fingertips along the tape. No crosshatch of reseal, no fuzz where adhesive had been lifted and pressed again. She fetched the paring knife from the kitchen and used just the tip to slice the seam. The paper sighed and parted. Inside, layers of crinkled kraft—then a rectangle cradled in the center like a heart. Phone. Plain black, cheap glass, the kind you buy with cash and no questions. It vibrated in her palm before she touched any button. Not a ring—no sound at all—just a tremor like a small animal waking. The screen woke with it, block letters on white: > don’t talk — just answer Her tongue formed hello on instinct; the message burned it away. She shot a look at the ceiling corner where wall met crown molding, at the outlet where a screw once looked wrong until she’d taken it apart, at the bookcase that had begun to feel like a witness. Paranoia was a language; once you spoke it, you heard it everywhere. She pressed ACCEPT without moving her lips. Static, then a breath. Then his voice, low, compressed, threaded with distance. “Are you alone?” Her throat moved around yes and swallowed it. She lifted the phone a fraction away from her mouth and let out a single neat cough, deliberate as a signed order. A beat. Then a whisper of relief, too small to be for her and too large to be anything else. “Good.” She didn’t close her eyes, but they wanted to. When he spoke quietly like this her mind assembled a picture even when she refused it: shoulders slightly forward as if he could ward a blow, head tilted just enough to catch a reflection, the Doberman somewhere nearby pretending not to eavesdrop. She hated that she could see him. She hated that the picture steadied her. “I found something,” Reeves said. “A list. Not the kind they want on paper. The ones who made it through.” He didn’t use the word survived; it would have implied mercy. “Not intact. Not well. But alive. They’re in the military hospital under euphemisms—rehab, observation, infection watch. I’m sending names to this number. Read, memorize, wipe. No printouts, no screenshots.” Her grip tightened until the edge cut crescents into her palm. “No voice on this line,” he added, as if he could hear the questions forming one by one behind her teeth. “If you need a tell: cough once for yes, twice for no.” She stared at the window without seeing it. The curtain hung like a quiet. She wanted to ask a hundred things—Where? Who’s guarding them? What did you risk? What did you pay? Her mouth stayed still. She let her breath be the only sound she made. “I’m also securing a fallback,” he continued. “A place to put you if this tightens.” A pause, and in it the faintest scrape, like a chair leg or a pencil moving. “You won’t like it.” Heat crawled up her neck. Because you think I’m breakable, she thought. Because you think I need a crate and a label: HANDLE WITH CARE. Because he was right about the danger and wrong about the part of her that refused cages. She could be both grateful and furious; people were not tidy. The phone buzzed—an incoming text sliding into the call like a card beneath a door. She didn’t look. She concentrated on the weight of the device and the weight of the room. “You’ve got two men on you,” Reeves said. “Sunglasses and a baseball cap. Amateurs with time. Sloppy turns mean when it realizes it’s sloppy. That’s today. Tomorrow the budget gets bigger.” Something in her wanted—absurdly, inconveniently—to say his name. To make the syllables into a rope between them. She pressed her tongue to her molars and stayed still. He kept going, voice a low metronome. “Don’t move alone this week. I know how that sounds in your head. Hate it anyway and follow it. If this phone rings without a text first, don’t answer. That won’t be me. Power down between uses. If anyone knocks, you don’t open. If a friend tries a surprise visit, you meet them anywhere but there.” He paused. Air moved on his end, the shape of a hand over the microphone. And then a woman’s voice, somewhere behind him and not trying to be quiet. Light, amused, the kind of ease you only use with someone you’ve used it with before. “We were in the middle of something,” she said, as if returning to a sentence she’d left on a table. “Can we get back to it?” The flinch arrived before Emily could block it. Just a needle under the ribs, quick and humiliating. Two months. The calendar in her bones clicked like a safety. Two months since the flag. Since the shovel. Since the reception where every plastic cup felt like a stranger’s hand. It wasn’t decent to feel jealousy in the shadow of a grave. Decency had never yet changed a human heart on command. Reeves’s voice went sideways and muffled, talking to the other woman, the kind of muted apology that says give me a minute without giving anything else. The woman’s laugh came soft and unbothered. It scratched a place inside Emily she had thought scabbed over. “Emily,” Reeves said, back to her, and there was impatience now, but also something like care welded into steel. “I’ll send the names and a note about your building. There’s a camera hidden in the third-floor exit sign. Avoid that landing. Use the laundry-room door; the lock sticks—kick low. If you have to leave, go one block north, two east. Don’t assume the first tail’s the only one. Be boring.” A laugh almost escaped her; she swallowed it. Be boring. As if fate respected camouflage. The phone buzzed again—another text arriving; her thumb twitched. She breathed through it. “Did you get all that?” he asked. “One cough for yes.” She coughed, and hated the way obedience felt like surrender when it was only strategy. He didn’t soften. He didn’t gloat. “Good,” he said. Papers whispered on his side, or maybe it was a sleeve against a table—small sounds that made the room around her feel too large. “You’ll want to move fast and careful. Those two don’t like each other. Make them shake hands.” She stared at the black screen while the call timer ticked quietly, and tried not to name the feeling in her chest. Anger. Yes. Fear, coiled and useful. Yes. And something else, salt-edged and unreasonable, scraped raw by a laugh from another room in another life. He must have known how long he’d held her line. He must have measured it against how long a person could stand at a window without being catalogued by a camera as a person who stood at windows. “I’ll call soon,” he said. “Not on a schedule anyone can predict. Don’t talk on this line. Don’t talk on any line. Read. Move. And—” The shape of her name was there again, just behind his teeth. “—don’t die on me,” he finished, like a man making a joke he hoped the room wouldn’t hear as prayer. There was a click, small and absolute. The call timer vanished. The cheap glass went dark. The apartment heaved its quiet back into place, rearranged by nothing and everything. The phone buzzed once more on her palm, a final text arriving as if to underline what he’d already said. She looked down. > LIST – STABILIZATION CANDIDATES (HOSPITALIZED) Ortiz, Samuel – PFC – Level 3 restrictions – seizures x2 – sedated. Halpern, Noah – CPL – suspected expressive aphasia – renal strain. Brennan, Lucas – SGT – fractures inconsistent with reported fall – soft restraints. Chen, Marcus – SPC – hypersensitivity, tachycardia – psych rec hold. Díaz, Hector – PVT – insomnia x 96h – night terrors – protective custody. +7 (see secure file) Another line, a moment later: > 3F exit sign = hidden cam. Laundry door lock sticks — kick low. One N, two E. Be boring. Her thumb hovered over Save. She didn’t. She read the names once, twice, again, until they stacked in her head like steps. Then she held the power button until the phone went black with intent, not just with idleness. She stood in her living room with the paper parcel sitting open and the word COSMETICS glaring its lie at her from the sticker and felt anger and purpose braid into something steadier than either alone. The woman’s voice still scraped like grit under a bandage. She refused to touch it. Not now.